Hello, Halo

"Baby Dolls?" The question hangs expectantly in the air. At the end of a grueling 12-hour day of working on Halo for PC, a visit to this legendary Dallas strip joint appears to be a no-brainer.

"Baby Dolls." The group of six quickly assents. Twenty-dollar lap dances and the stripper scent of strawberry-vanilla lie 15 minutes away. Strangely, this crowd doesn't look all that excited.

"Cool. Let me run to the bathroom real quick." With his youthful looks, collared shirt, and boundless energy, 32-year-old Randy Pitchford resembles a tall high schooler more than the president of Gearbox Software. "Then we can leave."

After Pitchford hustles off, fate reverses itself.

"You know ." Andrew Jenkins, the sole Microsoft representative at this point, has been getting his head handed to him all day by the Gearbox guys in Deathmatch Halo. "We could get a quick game in before we leave."

No one objects. "Works for me," says David Mertz, Halo for PC's level designer, who came to Gearbox right before it handled Half-Life: Opposing Force. "Death Island. I'll set it up."

Pitchford returns to an empty reception room and learns Halo has trumped naked women again! He's not surprised; there's no shame in gaming with this crowd. "I'd rather do this anyway," he confesses.

Two hours evaporate in what feels like 20 minutes. Lightning fast and furiously engaging, Halo for PC, much like the original game, clearly possesses the magical, intangible combination of gameplay, graphics, and intuitive design that sets apart legendary experiences like Quake and Counter-Strike from the merely good. But with a mouse and keyboard (as opposed to the Xbox controller), Halo's entertainment factor is amplified and somehow more direct.

"Wow." Pitchford, a professional magician who has performed at Los Angeles' legendary Magic Castle, leans forward in his chair and half shouts. "There are four Banshees in the air." Small, individual aircraft used by the alien menace known as the Covenant, the Banshees swoop and soar easily and responsively, leaving twin jet trails and a distinct, TIE fighterlike howl in their wake.

The four-way furball makes for an epic, intoxicating buzzthe type that lingers for hours and leads to post-Deathmatch yuckfests. The type of buzz Xbox gamers won't ever receive because the Xbox version of Halo doesn't allow Banshees in Deathmatch.

"Oh, man," Pitchford says. Now a gunner in a ground-mounted Covenant gun turret is picking off the four Banshees. Groans and laughter can be heard from 100 feet away. "That is sick." Pitchford's voice, normally quite even, suddenly jumps in octave and volume. "That's just sick!"

WHAT TOOK SO LONG?

Sick also describes the gut-wrenching sense of loss PC gamers experienced in May 2001 when Microsoft announced Halo would land on Xbox before an eventual PC port. Two years later, Microsoft and Bungie will finally bring the instant classic to its original platform late this summer.

What took so long? According to Gearbox, Xbox's technological sophistication, particularly at the graphics level, is most responsible for the delay. "Essentially, the Xbox is a PC in a box," Mertz explains. "But it's highly specialized hardware." At the time of its release, the Xbox videocard wasn't even available for PC.

The fact that Halo was almost single-handedly responsible for selling Microsoft's debut console at its launch lingers in the air, unmentioned and untouched.

Because Halo for Xbox allowed multiplayer only via LAN and direct connection, Gearbox had to build the PC version of Halo's networking code from scratch. Reardon takes a deep breath and rubs his eyes as he reflects on the project. "From an engineering standpoint, this work is substantial."

It's so substantial that Gearbox has as many engineers working on Halo for PC as the original Xbox version had. Half of them are working on networking code, and it's paying off. Even in early beta stages, the code seems extremely stable and capable of supporting many players.

If gamers can get past the ignoble notion of playing a port, Halo might be the next big multiplayer shooter online and in tournament play. Gameplay feels nicely balanced and incorporates a raft of new features. Flying Banshees, a flamethrower, a Warthog jeep with a rocket launcher, the Covenant gun turret, and a slew of new maps set on ice fields, islands, and crowded forests indicate Gearbox is focusing on this translation as seriously as an original game. (Unfortunately, co-op play won't be included.)

"Bungie had a lot of stuff they wanted to put into the [original] game," explains Mertz. "So we looked at that. But we were Halo fans before we got this project, and we've always had our own fantasies." Like a Hot Wheels Criss Cross Crashinspired map featuring a double jump in the center. Or the Fuel Rod gun, a mortar-type weapon capable of flipping over a Warthog.

Bungie Studios director Pete Parsons is clearly a huge Gearbox fan. "It was superimportant that we work with a kick-ass team that was passionate about Halo and had the experience to do the job right," he says. "Gearbox's work on Half-Life: Opposing Force and Tony Hawk 3 for the PC was top-notch."

Unfortunately, Gearbox's work on James Bond 007: NightFire was clearly not in the same league, a setback Pitchford and crew still struggle to shake off. Pitchford has a difficult time explaining: "We gave them what they needed .Historically, the more control Gearbox has had over a title, the better it has been."

The topic comes up repeatedly over the day, and it's almost painful watching Pitchford and Mertz process the grief and learn how to shake off the negatives. Perhaps in more ways than the teams understand now, even the James Bond franchise is integral to Gearbox's development.

THE HALO EXPERIENCE

"Halo is bulletproof." It's almost lunch, and Pitchford has just danced through the stunning single-player mode with Mertz at the controls. Given the substantial hype the Xbox version received from gamers and the mainstream press, it's easy to forget the primary reason Halo rocketed to the forefront of gamers' consciousness: the single-player experience. In the middle of an interstellar war, aliens level a starship. You and the ship's precious, top-secret dataEarth's locationare ejected onto a Ringworld. The aliens come hunting.

"It's a simple reason," Pitchford explains while Mertz plays through a frantic level where a human drop ship crash-lands and gets overrun by Covenant shock troops, "but Halo is great because it has a perfect feedback loop." Mertz unintentionally demonstrates this notion. As he bobs and weaves, firing on the alien soldiers, some of the Covenant troops throw their hands up and run, while others fan out and protect themselves with translucent energy shields. The sequence feels so immediate, it's hard to not bob and weave along with Mertz.

We move on to another level, one that demonstrates Halo's amazing capacity for storytelling. The score, dialogue, and gravity of the scene calls to mind Orson Scott Card's epic sci-fi novel, Ender's Game. Half-Life, Deus Ex, and System Shock aside, interactive science fictionparticularly in the shooter categoryrarely reaches these heights.

Envy Gearbox, whose partnerships with the likes of Bungie, Activision, Valve, and EA are providing a safe haven for scrutinizing and elaborating on esoteric rules of game design. "It's like Picasso said," Pitchford explains over lunch, "You have to learn the rules before you can break them."

Time will tell how well Gearbox has learned the rules, but for now the design shop's focus is solely on Halo for PC. "We want everyone who has an Xbox," Pitchford hopes, "to absolutely lust after this version."